[Newbies] Second transcript window?

[Blake]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:59:12 -0700, John Almberg <jalmberg at identry.com>  
wrote:

> Hi Blake,
>
> Yes, understood Scott's method. I was wondering about how to do it with  
> halos. I tried to do what you suggested and learned a few things (like  
> how to inspect a window, which caused some head-scratching until I found  
> the 'debug' menu).

Ah. Yes.

> But, I wasn't able to create a second, named transcript.

Well, a morph has a label and an externalName. The label is what you use  
in Etoys. (If you bring up an inspector by clicking on the "eye" icon in  
the halo, the label shows up.) The label is visible in the world, but I  
haven't found a good way in code to ask the World to "give me that morph  
labeled: 'whatever'".

The external name allows you to use the World submorphNamed: message to  
find it. You can also change the name with "Name":

sw := World submorphNamed: 'OldName'.
t := sw model.
t show: 'This now contains your independent transcript stream!'.
sw name: 'NewName'.

But this doesn't affect the label. You also have "named" in the sense of:  
the variable "t" refers to that transcript now. So, in your code it's  
"named" t.

> Anyway, no big deal. Scott's method is simple and what I needed. I was  
> just curious about the halos (which I haven't used much, yet.)

There's a sort-of wall between Etoys and the rest of Smalltalk. You can do  
a lot of things easily in Etoys and then hit a wall where straight  
Smalltalk code would be easier. But then, you don't necessarily want to  
give up all the easy stuff in Etoys.